Archive for February 20th, 2007

The Economist, London, has a story on India’s newspaper boom. And the small story—which is but a thinly disguised PR piece for the Hindustan Times‘ business paper Mint—offers a big reality-check on the fact-checking that is allegedly the weekly magazine’s forte.

1) It calls Metro Now Delhi’s first tabloid; Mid-Day has been around for decades.

2) It spells Mid-Day as Midday; it says Mid-Day has launched a bikini-clad mate on the lines of British papers, although Mid-Day Mate has been a feature of the tabloid ever since its launch 30 years ago.

3) It condescendingly terms most of India’s 300 big newspapers as “rags” without offering any substantiation for this ridiculous insult.

4) It blindly swallows the claim that Mint prebooked 55,000 copies at Rs 299 per year.

5) It says Times of India offered a combo with Economic Times for slightly more than the price of one paper, although the offer for the latter was barely Rs 100 per year in Mumbai.

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Robert Alder, the man who invented the television remote control, has died at age 93. Toby Harnden has a neat post on the man who gave us something else to hold while watching television. But, strangely, Alder was no couch potato; hiking and skiing were his passion. “I hardly ever turn the TV on,” he said in a 1996 interview. “And I certainly never channel surf.”